John Burton: Undermined by Dishonest History: Honest History Lecture Series, Manning Clark House, Canberra, Monday, 18 August 2014 Pamela Burton
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John Burton: undermined by dishonest history: Honest History lecture series, Manning Clark House, Canberra, Monday, 18 August 2014 Pamela Burton Dr John Burton headed the Department of External Affairs in 1947 at age 32, his minister being Herbert Vere Evatt (‘the Doc’). He and Evatt shared a joint vision for an Australian foreign policy independent of Britain and the United States. In his short public service career Burton had significant influence over Australia’s foreign policy. Ahead of his times, he held the view that Australia’s security in the Asia-Pacific region depended upon better understanding of and engagement with its neighbours. To achieve this, he advocated ‘open diplomacy’. Burton’s work and influence has been the subject of numerous scholarly works. Curiously, alongside the honest historians, there has been a concerted effort by some dishonest ideologues writing to discredit Burton and what he stood for. Sixty years on, malicious writers continue to skew the historic record by asserting that Burton betrayed his country. Why? And how can the record be corrected? I am a non-fiction writer. I would love to write fiction, but I’ve been told that it’s not my forte, because I can’t help letting truth get in the way of a good story. There are non-fiction writers, however, who won’t let the truth spoil a story. Take the example of a recent article in the magazine Quadrant, ‘The curious case of Dr John Burton’.1 A fictitious spy story if ever there was one, though it purported to be an historical account. The contributor was Rob Foot, better known as a perennial critic of the National Museum of Australia. I won’t encourage you to read it. Instead I will tell you the true story of John Burton. My talk raises questions about what motivates writers to write dishonestly. How do they live with their consciences? Or are they victims of self-deception, ideologues who are blind to the truth when it gets in the way of the myths they live by? Importantly for tonight’s talk, what can children do to destroy the credibility of those who have maligned their parents? The way John Burton has been treated by the political right is a case study of how a distorted picture of someone can be built up over time by commentators willing to undermine someone because of what they stand for. It’s the strategy of attacking the messenger, the bearer of threatening views. First, I must declare my interest. I am one of Dr John Burton’s daughters and, though possibly biased, I have done a lot of homework. My research reveals that one of the first brushstrokes on the ‘let’s get Burton’ canvas was a political attack in May 1952 by RG Casey, Minister for External Affairs. Under privilege of parliament in a speech designed to discredit the Labor Party he referred to ‘a nest of traitors’ in the Public Service, opening the door for WC Wentworth (Liberal, NSW) to suggest Burton might have handed a document to the Communist newspaper The Tribune. Casey, while conceding that there was nothing secret about the document, a draft Treaty of Friendship with the USA, and that it was ‘improbable, at least, that Dr Burton had been responsible’, given that he had left the Department 18 months before the leak occurred, successfully fuelled suspicion about Burton’s loyalty. 1 Rob Foot, ‘The curious case of Dr John Burton’, Quadrant, November 2013. 1 Eddie Ward (Labor, NSW) came to Burton’s defence, saying the attack was a cowardly attempt to smear Burton, who had left for China the previous week for a ‘Pacific Peace conference’ in Peking and couldn’t defend himself. The point of targeting Burton was that he had resigned from the Public Service in 1951 to become the endorsed Labor candidate for the federal seat of Lowe. Over a period of 50 years other players emerged to add their clumsy daubs to this portrait of Burton the traitor. After his death the palette was further enriched to depict him as a Russian spy – not any old spy but a GRU agent working for military intelligence, no less. On the other side of this canvas, John Burton has been described by various honest historians as one of the stars of the Public Service who substantially influenced Australia’s foreign policy after the Second World War. In 1999, in the Panorama section of the Canberra Times, Norman Abjorensen included Burton in his list of 50 ‘great unsung heroes’ who, over the Dr JW Burton and Dr HV Evatt, Downing Street, previous 100 years, had helped build the London, c. 1944 (supplied: Pamela Burton) nation. At 32 Burton was head of the External Affairs Department, responsible to the brilliant but erratic Herbert Vere Evatt, ‘the Doc’. He and Evatt shared a vision for an Australian foreign policy independent of Britain and the United States. I quote Ph. D. scholar, David Fettling, whose work I refer to again below: As Secretary of the Department of External Affairs between 1947 and 1950, Burton became the foremost champion in Australian government of an Asian regionalist orientation. Burton’s sharply pro-Republican stance in Indonesia was accompanied by a vision of Asia- wide political independence combined with economic growth and state-centred development ... Burton’s fundamental objective was to attain security and stability in Australia’s immediate environs, including from communist insurrections: in this way he was an exemplar of, not an exception to, Australia’s long ‘search for security.’ Burton believed that Australia’s security was dependent upon stability among the nations of the Asia Pacific region, a stability which could only be achieved if countries like India and Indonesia were free to achieve independence from their colonial masters. Unrest in developing nations could only encourage Communism. Political conservatives scorned such left-leaning approaches to international diplomacy. They believed that the British colonial hold had to be strengthened if Communism was to be repelled. 2 Independence movements, even those pushing for democratic self-government, were likely communist breeding grounds. The conservatives had a mantra, ‘If you are not with us, you are against us’ and ‘if you are against us, you are our enemy’. And in those days when Communists were the new enemy, suspicion fell on all radical thinkers. Alan Reid of the Sydney Sun took advantage of Casey’s political scaremongering while Burton was still in China. (Burton was there leading an unofficial Australian Delegation for preparatory talks before the September Peking Peace Conference.) His scheduled return was delayed. Cecily, his wife, wasn’t sure when he would be back, she told the press. Burton must either be ‘dead or red’, Reid implied in his news story, suggesting he was a spy. In fact, as became clear on his return on 17 June, Burton had extended his stay to make inquiries about the condition of three Australian airmen gaoled for 20 months in China shortly after Mao Zedong came to power. There were press reports that the prisoners were being cruelly treated by a primitive and repressive government. Burton did not want our nationals roughly treated, but neither did he believe it was in Australia’s interest for our press to smear the new China. Evatt, Chifley, and Burton all advocated recognition of Mao’s China to give Australia a platform for influencing Chinese policies as they affected Australia. It was important that Australia establish and maintain friendly relations with countries in our region. Much to the relief of the airmen’s parents, Burton’s intervention was largely responsible for the men’s release on 14 August 1952. Burton sued Reid and his paper. I was nine years old when, in 1955, Burton was awarded damages for the defamation. One hundred pounds – not quite the £25 000 he sought but enough to buy each of his three daughters a party dress. Mine was pale lemon lace and my father’s win was worth boasting about at school. But mud sticks. More than 50 years later, Prime Minister John Howard resurrected the slanders as ammunition for his ‘war on terror’. He likened terrorists to dangerous people from our past, and extraordinarily, he singled out Burton and, wait for it, historian Manning Clark. The occasion was Quadrant’s 50th anniversary dinner on 3 October 2006 and, in praising the magazine for taking up causes close to his heart, Howard said, ‘It’s worth recalling just some of the philo-communism that was once quite common in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s’. Burton and Evatt, United Nations Conference, San Francisco, 1945 (supplied: Pamela Burton) Howard told his audience that John Burton had argued that Mao’s China was a model for the ‘transformation’ of Australia. ‘Transformation’ was the single word Howard quoted as being Burton’s. He gave no reference, no date, and provided no context. Our father was not yet dead and his brain sprang into life when he read the Canberra Times report of the address, with front page headlines, ‘Reagan, Thatcher are PM’s heroes’. At 92, bedridden with 3 a back injury, he risked pneumonia to crawl out of bed to write a letter to the editor which Jack Waterford obligingly published. Our father was flattered to be remembered, albeit backhandedly, for his advocacy of a foreign policy that focused on Australia being part of Asia, rather than a province of the UK or the USA. Putting made-up words in someone’s mouth and then leaving it up to the targets to ‘prove’ they never said them, is, as author Doug Cocks puts it, one of the many ‘weapons of mass deception’ that word-tricksters deploy.